Music Scene: Over the Rhine finally getting deserved attention

With 14 albums and 20 years making music, the husband-and-wife duo known as Over the Rhine –– Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist –– is hardly an overnight success story.

Jay N. Miller

With 14 albums and 20 years making music, the husband-and-wife duo known as Over the Rhine –– Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist –– is hardly an overnight success story.

It’s their latest album, “The Long Surrender,” which is finally earning the Ohio couple deserved, if tardy, praise.

“We really appreciate all the attention this record has gotten, and it already looks like it will be our biggest one,” Detweiler said. Over the Rhine tours with their six-piece band.

The difference maker, Detweiler said, was working with roots-rocker Joe Henry, who produced this album. It was recorded over a week in his California home studio. Lucinda Williams does a guest vocal, singing a lovely duet with Bergquist on the song “Undamned.”

“The most exciting thing about working with Joe Henry was that we couldn’t imagine in advance what the record would sound like,” said Detweiler, from the couple’s 1830-era farmhouse outside Cincinnati.

“Joe’s producing-philosophy is believing in having the right people, and then have everybody come into a room together and play. A lot of what you hear on the album are first takes.”

The fulcrum of Over the Rhine’s sound is Bergquist’s soaring, ethereal alto vocals over Detweiler’s haunting piano, and the resulting sound is as much folk as jazz or pop, soulful and immediate. The duo’s lyrics are simple yet literary, sometimes mysterious yet always affecting, and hopeful even when depicting difficult subjects. The best thing Henry’s spare production does on the CD is give the music and words space to breathe.

“Joe is a big believer in capturing an event as it happens,” Detweiler said of the recording process. “There is not a lot of studio wizardry here. He just likes to let musicians play together.”

The touring sextet includes different musicians, but the vibe is similar in that each night is intended to be a new interpretation.

“The exciting thing about these songs is that each night we play them, each performance is unique,” Detweiler said. “It is not about re-creating the parts or carefully executing the arrangement, but more about capturing an event. We are not trying to re-create every nuance from the record, but trying to create an exciting experience.”

Among the many striking songs on the album, Detweiler’s “All My Favorite People (Are Broken)” is one of the most poignant, as its title chorus depicts how people must be resilient to survive. We’ve read somewhere that he’s a big Ernest Hemingway fan, and we suggest that this tune is the ultimate expression of a central Hemingway tenet from his line in “A Farewell to Arms”:

“The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places,” he sings.

“I hadn’t thought of that, of Ernest Hemingway specifically, when I wrote that,” Detweiler said. “I actually wish I could write with his beautiful, spare simplicity. I’m always trying to simplify things I wrote. That song came from Karin and I having a conversation in our kitchen, doing the dishes and trying to process the way so many of our friends have lost so much, suffered so much, in the past few years. I can’t remember which one of us said that title line, but we both knew we had to write a song about it.”

One of the songs Bergquist wrote is particularly memorable, as “Only God Can Save Us Now” was inspired by her elderly mother’s being in a nursing home the last nine years after a stroke. It’s a country-sounding ballad, with some funny and affectionate portraits of the various characters in such a facility, yet, of course, it has its heartbreaking undercurrent, too.

“Well, we’ve known a number of characters over the past nine years Karin’s mom has been there,” Detweiler said. “Karin likes to say that place is a head-on collision between comedy and tragedy.”

Bergquist also found the album’s title, a line she lifted from a poem by their neighbor, B.H. Fairchild, “Rave On.” She also sings a version of that poem she adapted on the album, and “the long surrender” is sort of an acceptance of life’s vagaries and the circumscribed ambitions we all encounter.

“This was a hard collection of songs to name,” Detweiler said. “We borrowed that line from ‘Rave On’ because it could refer to some of our friends who’ve lost everything in the latest economic downturn, and find themselves starting over again with almost nothing. How much do we get to hold onto? Creatively, it is often only when you let go of expectations and let something happen, let it unfold, that you succeed.”

Another layer for me was having to bury my father a few years ago and the family having me write the obituary and having to surrender gracefully to that kind of life transition.”

The song with the Lucinda Williams guest vocal is Detweiler’s “Undamned,” breathtaking in its soulfulness, as the two voices blend seamlessly.

“Lucinda came in to Joe’s studio that day,” Detweiler recalled. “When she leaned into the microphone and we all heard those two voices together, there was not a dry eye in the room.”

The only cover among the album’s 13 songs is Kim Taylor’s “Days Like This,” an affirmative paean to grabbing the moment and persevering.

“Kim is our great friend and we decided it was time to record one written by Kim. She wrote this song on the road during a particularly low point, just after she had called Karin and told her ‘I quit,’ and Karin talked her out of it. So the song, and Kim, are special to us,” Detweiler said.

Some of the album’s other standouts include “Laugh of Recognition,” which might be termed a twangy folk number urging men to grow up; “Sharpest Blade” which frames a poem about love’s complexity in classic Celtic folk; and “Infamous Love Song,” a subtly intense piano ballad that examines enduring love in a surreal, Tom Waits-kind of way.

“Soon,” with its dreamy melody and lyrics from Henry that seem almost improvised, might remind fans of Leonard Cohen. But “Bluebird,” inspired by a Charles Bukowski poem, is a jazz tune with a sax solo from Levon Henry, Joe’s son. “Oh Dear By the Way” is a breezy pop duet between the couple, where the light-hearted banter never makes it clear if the relationship is continuing or not.